Evolution and Meaning. Richard Oxenberg. Suppose an infinite number of monkeys were to pound on an infinite number of

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1 1 Evolution and Meaning Richard Oxenberg I. Monkey Business Suppose an infinite number of monkeys were to pound on an infinite number of typewriters for an infinite amount of time Would they not eventually produce all the works of Shakespeare? This thought experiment is often offered by metaphysical reductionists as a way of suggesting that intelligence, or the appearance of it, could emerge from a purely random process given enough time and energy. Since our universe has an abundance of time and energy, so it is thought, it is not unreasonable to believe that everything we see, including ourselves, might have emerged from just such a purely random process. If we wish to know how such a random process might produce such complex creatures as ourselves we are pointed to the theory of evolution and the logic of natural selection. Some combinations of particles are survivable and others not. Those that are persist to become the basis for even more complex combinations. Thus, complexity can be produced from randomness. So the reasoning goes. But is the reasoning behind these arguments sound? Do they really show what they purport to show? These are the questions I wish to consider in this brief paper. Let us start with the example of the monkeys and begin by conceding the hypothesis proffered. Supposing an infinite number of monkeys could pound on an infinite number of typewriters for an infinite amount of time it is reasonable to assume that eventually all

2 2 permutations of letters would be produced by these monkeys, including the complete works of Shakespeare. But does this example suggest what the reductionists wish? We need to consider the matter carefully. Where, we must ask, have the typewriters come from? Typewriters, after all, are machines designed for the purpose of producing meaningful words, sentences, etc. One presses down a key and a letter is produced. But what is a letter? A letter is only a 'letter' to the extent that it serves, or can serve, as an elementary unit of a potential word. A word, furthermore, is itself only a 'word' to the extent that it can be strung together with other words to produce meaningful sentences. Finally, sentences are sentences as aspects of meaningful language. In other words, in the example of the monkeys, the potentiality for meaning is already inherent within the typewriters themselves. It is only because there is already something like language that a typewriter containing the elementary units of language can exist, upon which monkeys might then randomly pound. The monkeys are not producing meaning from meaninglessness, but from elements of a system in which meaning is already implicit. Consider, for instance, another example. Suppose that instead of letters we rigged the typewriter to produce 26 varieties of small polygonal shapes when the keys were struck. One key might produce a small square, another a small hexagon, etc. Now allow an infinite number of monkeys to pound on an infinite number of such typewriters for an infinite amount of time. Under such circumstances they would never, could never, produce the works of Shakespeare. All they could ever produce would be an endless array of meaningless polygons. What this suggests is that unless the meaning is already

3 3 within the system, in potentia, it cannot come out of it. Basically, this supports Aristotle's insight that actuality must precede potentiality. The monkey example only works because we forget that typewriters are already instruments of meaning, and could only be available to the monkeys to the extent that they were produced by rational beings who already know what language is. What is the relevance of this for the metaphysical implications of evolutionary theory? Metaphysical reductionists wish to claim that the reality we see is fundamentally made up of originally independent particles which have come together through random processes to produce the great variety of macro objects we now see in the world, including ourselves. The appearance of 'intelligent design,' they claim, is an illusion produced by processes of natural selection. In reality, all that exists are individual--and, hence, 'meaningless'--particles. Over vast amounts of time these particles have come together, with the aid of natural selection, to produce the illusion of preordained order. But have the reductionists thought the matter through carefully enough? In particular, have they thought out the implications of a reality in which separate particles are capable of such tight integration that they can combine to form a living organism capable of standing upon its hind legs, looking at itself in the mirror, and saying 'I'--just as if it were a single entity rather than a collection of billions of miscellaneous particles? Particles capable of such coherence are extraordinary particles indeed! Quite unlike anything we imagine when we imagine independent particles. Let's take another example. Suppose we take an infinite number of monkeys, place them on a beach with an infinite amount of sand, and let them scoop this sand up and toss

4 4 it around for an infinite amount of time. Although the spatial position of each granule of sand vis-à-vis the others might change in an infinite variety of ways, this process would surely never produce anything but piles of sand. A living organism would never be produced through such a process. Certainly not a human being. The reason for this is simple: Sand, as such, simply hasn't the capacity for becoming a living organism. The granules haven't the capacity to relate to each other in the intricate ways required for anything like life to emerge. In other words, we can reverse the old computer adage 'Garbage in, garbage out' and say: where human beings are the output, garbage cannot be the input. That human beings have emerged from the cosmic process implies that the fundamentals of this process were always already far richer than reductionism allows for. Nor do we know how much richer. What reason do we have to think that with human beings we have seen the end of this universe's capacity to organize itself into self-aware, integrally related, beings? Who knows if human beings are not just the beginning of something we can scarcely imagine? But what I wish to emphasize is that the possibility of human beings must have always already been implicit in the 'stuff' of this universe even when it was just cosmic 'soup'; if not they could never have emerged. What this means is that the organization we see around us, and within us, is, in some very real sense, fundamental to reality as such. And, as said, we do not know how much more organization is possible.

5 5 II. Natural Selection and Jigsaw Puzzles Natural selection, it is said, accounts for the illusion of design we see around us. But have we really understood what natural selection implies metaphysically? Natural selection weeds out those ordered combinations of particles that are incapable, for whatever reason, of becoming stably integrated with the natural system as a whole; i.e., with their 'environment.' What remains, as a result, are just those organisms that can be integrated. But what determines whether or not an organism can or cannot be integrated in a sustainable way? Is it not the ordered possibilities implicit to the system as such? In other words, natural selection, far from a random process, is more accurately seen as the mechanism through which the system as a whole organizes itself into the order (or some one of the possible orders) intrinsic to it. This process is not random, but predicated on the potentiality for order already implicit in the fundamentals of the system. In other words, Shakespeare plays can come out of a typewriter only if the typewriter already has the possibility for Shakespeare plays within it. What natural selection does, in effect, is to discard combinations of letters that have no meaning; i.e., cannot be fit into the relational whole--making it thereby possible for complexity, which is to say, 'order,' to increase. As it does, the universe increasingly realizes its potential as an ordered whole. Considered in this way it is entirely meaningful to speak of 'higher level' and 'lower level' organisms. Higher level organisms are just those organisms that can emerge only through modification at a lower level. In other words, it is only on the basis of one-celled organisms that multi-celled organisms can emerge. Only on the basis of multi-celled organisms can complex animal life emerge. Only on the basis of such animal life can a creature with the neo-cortex of a human being emerge. Is it not extraordinary that as we

6 6 climb the phylogenetic scale, as we see more and more complex organisms emerging, we also see more and more highly developed forms of consciousness and spiritual life emerging? What are the implications of this for what the universe fundamentally is? Surely it implies that high levels of consciousness--at least as high as the human being-- are already implicit in the fundamentals of being. It cannot be the case, indeed it has no real meaning to say, that matter just 'accidentally' combines in these remarkable ways. It must be the case that such organization, the potential for such organization and, with it, consciousness, is inherent to the system from the beginning. The model I would propose for thinking about this is that of a jigsaw puzzle. The manufacturers of jigsaw puzzles, of course, do not first produce an assortment of miscellaneous pieces with the hope that they will then fit together. Were jigsaw puzzles produced in this way there would be no hope at all. Rather, the jigsaw puzzle is first of all produced as a whole and then cut up into pieces which fit together because they were, literally, made for each other--or, better, made with each other. The jigsaw puzzle hobbyist is not creating the whole, he is simply fitting the pieces back together in the way they were meant to fit together; i.e., in the way in which they are orderable as a whole. He proceeds, furthermore, in a manner analogous to natural selection; i.e., through trial and error. He first of all takes a piece and tries to fit it together with another, turning it this way and that to see if it will fit. If, after some experimentation, he finds that it will not fit he discards the piece and reaches for another and goes through the process again. Eventually, when he does manage to fit a few pieces together, he leaves those alone, allows those to endure, and goes to find other pieces that he can now fit together with

7 7 these. In this way the puzzle takes shape as an ordered whole. There is a certain randomness to the process but there is also a certain order to it, an order implicit in the fact that the pieces are meant for each other to begin with. True, the jigsaw puzzle worker has an idea of what he is trying to accomplish. But one can well imagine a machine that would randomly work at putting pieces together, keeping those combinations that fit and building on these, until the puzzle as a whole were finished. Such a machine would act 'blindly' just as natural selection is said to, but its success would not be a result of randomness but of the ordered possibilities inherent to the system as such. What this implies, simply, is that the data of evolution are entirely compatible with an essentially teleological, holistic, metaphysic of being. A metaphysic, for sure, in which there is a great deal of play and creativity, but one in which the outcome or outcomes have a certain preordained inevitability. Indeed, I would go further and say that the data of evolution favor such a view. III. Minds and Matter This picture is made more complicated, and richer still, through the recognition that we know of matter only through our minds. And there is no reason to suppose that what we are now able to 'sense' about matter is all there is to it. On the contrary, just as the existence of electromagnetism was not known until the end of the 19 th century, it is entirely possible that there are features of matter that we now have no knowledge of. Indeed, quantum physics has already presented us with an account of matter that virtually defies rational comprehension. Matter is not really anything like the tiny billiard balls 17 th century physics imagined. To put it simply; we really can't say that we know what's

8 8 going on at the deepest metaphysical levels of this universe. But what we can say is that whatever is going on, it is almost unimaginably rich. The fact that we know of matter only through our minds also suggests that what matter is 'in itself' may be quite other than what we sense it to be (cf. Kant). Is there organization at the highest levels of the universe which is somehow guiding the organizing processes at the lowest levels? I submit that this is a matter about which we cannot now form a reasoned conclusion--however, the very data of evolution now used to deny such a possibility can, I think, be better used to support it. The very fact that matter can organize itself into persons such as we, capable of saying 'I,' suggests that such 'organizability' is fundamental to reality as such. In other words, first comes the jigsaw puzzle as a whole, at the highest level of organization, and then come the pieces. This, of course, is just the thesis of theism. All these considerations leave us more or less in the position of Socrates: what we can know is that we know nothing for sure. It may be that the human being is the highest level of consciousness this universe is capable of. In that case the human being would also be the highest level of meaning, and the appropriate ethic would be an atheistexistentialist ethic, on the order of Nietzsche, Sartre, or Camus. My contention, however, is that our very thirst for meaning suggests that there is more going on than meets the human, or at least the reductionist, eye. The very fact that Sartre, for instance, would experience meaninglessness as nausea suggests that his sense of meaninglessness is a sense of privation. Nausea, after all, is sickness. Sickness is a privation of health. What, then, would constitute health? Does not Sartre s very nausea imply his fundamental

9 9 orientation to that which would overcome it? Is it not at least possible, then, that the individual human being--a product of almost unimaginable ordering--is itself ordered to something beyond the individual--as virtually every serious thinker prior to the moderns has supposed? I suggest that it is only a shallow consideration of the implications of evolutionary theory that would exclude such a possibility. A more penetrating consideration of the significance of evolution leaves the question open, at least. Combine all this with age-old, and all but universal, reports of mystical experience, revelations, etc., and it seems to me we have more than enough rational sanction for exploring the possibility of transcendent meaning beyond the restraints materialist-reductionism would impose.